SayTape: Recorder & Transcribe

A voice recorder with transcription for lectures, meetings, interviews and notes. It keeps your audio and turns speech to text on your phone, offline once a speech model is downloaded.

RECORDING THAT KEEPS GOING
• Tap Record and it starts. No dialogs or folder picker first.
• Keeps recording with the screen off and while you use other apps.
• Saved every few seconds. If the app or phone stops, the next launch recovers it and labels it "Recovered".
• A call or another app silencing the microphone does not end the recording; the silent stretch is marked.
• Pause and resume in the same file. Bookmarks, with an optional note, from the app or the notification.
• Level meter, elapsed time, storage estimate. No length limit other than free space.
• Home-screen widget and Quick Settings tile to start and stop.
• Choose the microphone: phone, wired, USB or Bluetooth. Many Bluetooth headsets record in narrow band; if Android does not use the chosen mic, the phone mic records and you are told.
• Optional live draft while recording (Base model): rough, not saved, uses more battery. The real transcript is made after you stop.

TRANSCRIPTS ON THE PHONE
• OpenAI's Whisper models run on your phone. Audio is not uploaded.
• 99 transcript languages, chosen per recording. Each shows its accuracy from published tests; many are low, and some were never measured.
• Base (60 MB, faster) or Small (190 MB, more accurate); SayTape measures your phone and suggests one.
• Silence and noise produce no invented text.
• Custom vocabulary: add names and terms to guide transcription. It can help; it does not guarantee they are spelled right.
• Optional speaker labels (Speaker 1, Speaker 2…), which you can rename. Labels are a best guess; overlapping speech and similar voices are often mixed up. Needs an extra 30 MB download through Google Play.
• Keeps transcribing with the app closed and resumes where it stopped.
• Audio to text for files you have: open or share in M4A, MP3, WAV, AAC, OGG/Opus (if your phone decodes them).

READ, FIND, EDIT
• Tap a word to play from there; the word being played is highlighted.
• Speed 0.5×–2×, skip silence, skip back/forward, waveform scrubbing.
• Correct mistakes in the text; timing stays attached.
• Remove parts of the audio by selecting words. The original stays untouched.
• Search every transcript at once, including Japanese and Arabic.
• Folders, sorting, multi-select, trash.

YOUR FILES
• Recordings are ordinary M4A files in your Recordings folder.
• Export text, text with times, SRT or WebVTT subtitles, DOCX or PDF (with speaker names), and M4A, WAV or MP3 audio with or without your cuts. Saved files are checked after writing.
• Optionally keep a .txt or .srt copy of every transcript in Documents/SayTape.
• Backup and move to a new phone: one file with recordings, transcripts and marks, saved where you choose. The file is not encrypted and does not include speech models. SayTape does not upload it.

WHAT SAYTAPE DOES NOT DO
• It does not record phone calls. During a call Android gives the microphone to the call.
• It is not equally accurate in every language. Arabic accuracy is low with both models.
• It is not fast on every phone; on older processors an hour of audio can take an hour or more.
• It cannot guarantee every phone maker leaves it running in the background; a battery-settings guide is included.
• It needs Google Play to download a speech model once.
• It does not start recording by itself, sync to a cloud, back up automatically, or ask for an account.

PERMISSIONS
• Microphone — to record when you tap Record.
• Notifications — recording controls and transcription progress.
• Foreground services — to keep recording and transcribing with the screen off.
• Change audio settings — only to use a Bluetooth microphone.
Only the small ad banner uses the internet; no analytics of our own.

Privacy policy: https://basilbase.com/privacy-policy/
Contact: contact@basilbase.com

Recent changes:
A fresh new look: a new app icon, a clearer home screen with the most important things up front, colour-coded settings and an updated dark theme. Everything works as before.